Quiet Night
by Agent Frostbite
Summary: A ghostly figure wanders the halls of Avengers Tower one morning late in autumn, but all is not what it seems with this ethereal visitor. (Also, why is there no category for 'Calming, quiet, everything-is-generally-okay' on here?)


Wanda Maximoff snapped straight up in bed, barely cutting off a shriek of surprise, alarm, and terror. She ran her right hand up and down her left shoulder, trying to locate the injury sustained in her latest nightmare. After being unable to find it, and realizing the soft, satiny substance was her white nightgown, she breathed a quiet sigh of relief.

 _Pietro._

She removed the blankets and sat up, her feet tentatively touching the rug placed next to her bed – she hated when her bare feet touched the cold floor, but she also disliked the idea of wearing socks in bed even more – and she blinked sleep away before creeping out and across the hall to her brother's room. She pushed the door open slowly, quietly, and peeked in.

He was splayed out on the bed, limbs tangled in his many blankets, mouth open, drooling into his pillow. She suppressed a chuckle at a particularly loud snore, after which he shifted a little. She never understood how he could sleep in such strange positions. Satisfied he was safe and sound (but more importantly, _alive_ ), she crept back out and closed the door just as silently as she opened it.

She returned to her room and burrowed under her covers, staring at the ceiling. She didn't close her eyes too often, tired as she was, because the nightmare would simply restart at its worst part every time she did so. She wasn't exactly eager to relive it, so she didn't sleep. She sighed in frustration and sat up once more, deciding that if she _was_ going to sty awake, she wasn't going to just lay in bed, miserable.

As much as she hated feeling the cold floor, she couldn't bring herself to go put on slippers or socks or anything. She simply slipped out of her room and began to wander down the hallway.

She walked past everyone else's rooms, occasionally letting her hand brush against the doors. She smiled faintly as she thought she must look like some kind of a ghost. Well, she was gliding like one, plus the bare feet, long hair, and white, trailing nightgown… What harm would a little roleplaying do? So she let her expression become serene as she seemingly floated through the halls, her nightgown catching whatever light there was and reflecting it, giving her an almost shimmering appearance.

She glided down several more halls before deciding that her spectral fantasy might be better severed in a different environment. Thinking for a few minutes while leaning on a wall – hair draped over her shoulder, as even a pensive expression would still fit a ghost – she settled on one of the holodeck forest programs.

Her journey went something like this: Leaving the wall and gliding down the hallway, turning the corner and almost hitting a table, 'gliding' a little faster toward the elevator, selecting the floor she thought the holodeck was on, exploring said floor, becoming slightly frustrated and asking Jarvis for assistance, going to the floor the holodeck was _actually_ on, bumping her knee into an end table that was there for no reason at all, shushing the various objects that fell of it, replacing said objects, entering the holodeck, programming it, and _then_ continuing her pretending.

A rather eventful journey for some simple late night/early morning/whatever-you-call-3-AM roleplaying.

The wilderness she programmed was not unlike that of Sokovia. The great tall pines and cedars stretched toward the starry sky above her, reaching to dizzying heights as they stood like guardians and gatekeepers of some deep secret of the woods she was venturing into. She weaved her way through the thick trunks and knee-high underbrush, gazing around while remembering to glide.

It was a tranquil place. Untouched, save paths through the undergrowth, only found when she got a certain depth in, likely created by the others. Moonlight filtered through the leaves, casting shadows on the ground that shifted with the occasional cool breeze that swept through the comfortably warm land. It bathed everything in a pale white light that made the landscape seem enchanted.

The path, once clean-cut grass, now went two directions. One continued straight, and was he same grass she had walked on up until now. The other, branching off to the left, travelling up and then going around some predetermined bend, was moss and grass in patches. The bushes came much closer to the path, and flowers grew across it, while the former remained as neat as ever. She went left, simply for pleasure.

The moss was cool and spongey, and walking across it felt like walking across a carpet. Her nightgown trailed behind her, brushing past the flowers – whose colors that might look brilliant in the daytime, seemed pale and muted in the moonlight, though not in a dreary way. Fireflies swarmed, darting to and fro, lighting up on intervals only they knew the reasoning to, while the chorus of nighttime insects and birds fill the air.

She smiled and continued to walk until she came upon a pond. The glowing algae, something Nikki must've added to the program, lit up the area with an almost magical air. Perfectly suited for her purposes. She knelt down and watched the small fish swimming just below the surface. She dipped her hand into the still water, and one of the fish swam up and brushed up against it. It was like they trusted her. Maybe she was the caretaker? The Phantom Caretaker of The Forest. She liked that idea.

She stood once more and walked along the edge of the pond, through the reeds that came up to her waist. Frogs joined the chorus, their _ribbits_ both close and far away. The fireflies were joined by dragonflies, who zipped around the edges of the pond. Occasionally, she would wander through a patch of the reeds and tall grass and disturb some swarm of tiny flying creatures, who would fly away in all directions. It was a very peaceful scene, indeed.

She ended her long journey under her favorite willow tree. She entered beneath its drooping branches, brushing them aside like a curtain, similar to how she saw people do it in movies, making it the proverbial icing on the cake for her spectral walk. As she sat there, playing with her hair and looking at her serene surroundings, a deer came into view. "So it _is_ real," she murmured with a slight chuckle.

The deer, a product of someone's fantasy of being an animal tamer, had never been wiped from any of the forest programs that included any wildlife of any kind. There were several theories for that, none of which Wanda commented on, ranging anywhere from Tony's apparent like for the deer to Jarvis' affinity for keeping jokes going, and even Janet hacking every program and placing it in there.

She thought that its name was Ashina, and the graceful deer always managed to find people when they strayed into one of the many programs where she resided. As such, Ashina walked over to her, and Wanda stretched out her hand to pet the creature. The deer lingered for a few minutes, accepting the affection as Wanda was willing to give it, before looking back toward the forest, then turning and nodding (no, she _nodded_ , actually nodded, and no-one could convince Wanda otherwise), and bounding off into the trees once more.

Wanda, however, was content to stay beneath her tree, thinking until she almost dozed off. She drifted in and out of consciousness a few times before deciding to head back up to her room and deactivating the program. The return trip wasn't as long or graceful as the initial one had been, but it got her from point A to point B with 5 more hours for whatever sleep he could find.

All in all, a mostly quiet night.


End file.
